The Political Thread

[The Legendary Shark]

As the old joke goes, "I know you think you understand what you thought I wrote, but I'm not sure you realize that what you read is not what I meant."

;-)

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

The more I learn about this Vladimir Putin character the less I care for him

[Jim_Campbell]

The more I learn about this Vladimir Putin character the less I care for him

I'm starting to think he might be a wrong 'un, despite what that nice Mr Trump says...

[The Doctor Alt 8]

I really appreciated being woken up at 7;30 am yesterday morning not with a nice Happy Birthday message but with a "Have you seen World War 3 has just started".  Grrr

[Funt Solo]

Happy Birthday!

[The Doctor Alt 8]

Thank you...

[The Doctor Alt 8]

The more I learn about this Vladimir Putin character the less I care for him

I'm starting to think he might be a wrong 'un, despite what that nice Mr Trump says...

I think Putin has "lost it". If he doesn't withdraw his very rich friends will become his enemies and somehow he'll be bumped off.

[IndigoPrime]

Feels like he took a punt and miscalculated how much of a fight he'd have on his hands. Estimates suggest his rich friends have so far lost $39bn, IIRC. You do wonder how much patience they will have. It also appears to have woken up a few countries to basic realities of the modern world (UK Tories relying on Russian money; the EU being too dependent on Russian gas; China realising that always nodding along with Russia isn't going to cut it now; even Hungary now thinking twice about going full despot).

[milstar]

What irritates me here is big man Boris promising military help to Ukraine, like there are no bigger issues to solve on the homefront, such us taking care of the country in post-Brexit. Jumbling into internecine conflicts always led up to disasterous consequences afterwards. What a plonker.

[paddykafka]

My knowledge of geo-politics - and politicians in general - could be written on the back of a stamp, but it strikes me as a somewhat scary thought that Putin - if recent reports are to be believed - has gone a bit doolally. An insane politician who has already hinted at the use of nuclear weapons is a terrifying prospect. I wonder what it will take before some of his own associates wake up and smell the proverbial coffee?

[GoGilesGo]

Paddy,

I think it is a big mistake to tend towards believing Putin's actions in Ukraine are a corollary of recent madness.*

His televised, hour-long address to the nation last week put together a coherent argument that Ukraine is part of Russia and only exists as an independent entity because Lenin stitched a large bloc of borderland Russia to Eastern Poland and parts of Hungary to create a new state. He told George W Bush as far back as 2008 that he did not believe Ukraine to be a real country.

I appreciate this mindset is difficult (impossible?) to comprehend for those of us who are not ethno-chauvinists, but Putin is ex-KGB, and has been surrounded by other Siloviki for nigh on two decades. In the last 15 years Russia has occupied parts of Moldova & Georgia and taken the Crimea, with more or less no consequence. This move is degrees of magnitude larger, but along the same trajectory.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2022/02/why-putin-invaded-ukraine

By the always excellent Bruno Maçães is well worth a read.



*While tying I read the news Putin has put Russia's nuclear forces on "special alert" so perhaps he is about to go full Bad Bob Booth.

[IndigoPrime]

He wants the old empire back (including Finland) and is betting no-one will stop him if he adopts the madman theory. The tiny snag is this: he might well be a madman.

[Funt Solo]

Echoing gogilesgo's points, I found this page informative: Territorial evolution of Russia.

The city of Lviv, currently in western Ukraine, close to the Polish border, was in Poland prior to the Russian and German invasion of the country in 1939 (as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).

Part of the reason for the expansion of the USSR at the end of WWII, and then the Cold War that followed, was that Russia got brutalized by Nazi Germany to a much larger extent than the other allies. 20-27 million deaths, compared with the USA's less than half a million. Even as percentage of population, it's 13.7% to 0.32%. (UK was 0.94%, Germany was about 8.5%, China was 3.38%.)

So, Russia bled. One of the key things they took from that harsh lesson was that a buffer zone should exist between their core state and the outside world - so that's why, at the end of the war, they stayed in all the territory that they'd conquered on the way to Berlin.

Putin's outward perspective is that the buffer zone between Russia and any potential enemy has been eroded and that now they are even more vulnerable than they were at the outset of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa.

---

The obvious counterpoint is the argument that NATO is a defensive, not offensive, alliance. That there is no equivalent to Nazi Germany on the borders of Russia. (China would be the more obvious belligerent, frankly.) That Ukraine is an independent state with as much right to exist as anyone else. That Putin's reasoning is more to do with the cementing of personal power than the notion of a wider Russia.

And there are echoes of Hitler's reasoning in annexing the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. A warmonger is a warmonger. The reasoning behind it is always, at the end of the day, an excuse to brutalize your neighbors and maintain a grip on absolute power.

Not madness, then. Evil, perhaps.

[milstar]

Whatever Putin reasoning might be, I find his "N" rhetorics as scary bedtime story. WW3? Metaphorically speaking, we already live in WW3. Nuclear warheads weren't flying in 1962, as they weren't since 1945. And Cold War was already much strressful period. And I don't expect this conflict will last much (but with using knee-jerk to reserve my wrongness). Whatever the outcome might be. And please without Johnson's involvement!

(Crimea for a long time has been Russian; only when Kruschov (or whathisname) made catastrophical error, transferring it to Ukrainian SSR).

[Tjm86]

Part of the reason for the expansion of the USSR at the end of WWII, and then the Cold War that followed, was that Russia got brutalized by Nazi Germany to a much larger extent than the other allies. 20-27 million deaths, compared with the USA's less than half a million. Even as percentage of population, it's 13.7% to 0.32%. (UK was 0.94%, Germany was about 8.5%, China was 3.38%.)

The death toll on the Eastern Front definitely puts much of what happened elsewhere in the shade.  What also needs to be remembered though is the number of deaths in the inter-war period that resulted from the Revolution, Civil War, purges, famines and other activities.  Wholesale deportations, mass incarceration, judicial abuses ... Estimates vary quite widely.  [for an interesting literary account, Solzhenitsyn's "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is well worth a read.  It is also quite a short piece, compared to his three volume "Gulag Archipeligo".]

From the point of view of Ukraine, the Holodomor or Terror Famine is a major issue.  Contested as genocide, there is certainly evidence to suggest that the famine was a deliberate act on the part of the Soviet regime.  Hence the strength of feeling about Russian rule.